Three engineering faculty receive Young Investigator Award

Three Berkeley Engineering faculty members are among 38 recipients of the 2021 Young Investigator Award, a highly competitive recognition of academic achievement and potential for scientific impact given to early-career researchers.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program includes $20 million in research funding to be shared among all the recipients. Grants, which typically range from $510,000 to $750,000 over three years, help support postdocs and graduate student stipends as well as lab equipment and other research expenses.

The following are the UC Berkeley awardees and their respective research areas:

• Alvin Cheung, assistant professor, electrical engineering and computer sciences
  A Framework for Automatic Leveraging of Trusted Execution Environments
• Grace Gu, assistant professor, mechanical engineering
  Machine Learning for Rational Design of Impact Resistant Composites
• Somayeh Sojoudi, assistant professor-in-residence, electrical engineering and computer sciences and mechanical engineering
  High-performance Computational Methods for Nonlinear Machine Learning Problems

In an ONR press release, the Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Lorin C. Selby said that “it is essential that we attract the best and brightest scientists and engineers from across academia” to maintain this country’s competitive advantage, and the Young Investigator Program “does just that.”

The full list of award recipients is online. They represent 25 academic institutions in 13 states.